In the world of consumer devices, and particularly consumer electronics, there is an ever-present demand for improved appearance, improved functionality, greater efficiency, greater durability, lower cost, and improved aesthetics. Industrial design has become a highly skilled profession that focuses on fulfilling this need for enhanced consumer product appearance, functionality, and aesthetics.
One area that continually receives great attention for improvement is user displays. Providing crisp, attractive, unambiguous, and intuitively friendly displays and information for the user is very important in many consumer products. However, consumer products constantly diametrically pull display requirements both to be smaller for some products while to be larger for other products. Consumers also expect ever improving performance and reliability with ever decreasing cost.
Numerous technologies have been developed to meet these requirements. Some of the research and development strategies focus on new technologies while others focus on improving the existing and mature technologies. Research and development in the existing technologies may take a myriad of different directions.
One approach uses Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp (CCFL) as a backlight for liquid crystal displays (LCD). The CCFL approach has a number of drawbacks, such as scalability, brightness variation over time, toxic material, and robustness. Contemporary display products may range from very large displays for large sports arenas to a desktop form factor to a portable appliance. CCFL display architectures do not scale well for the broad range of form factors required by the various display applications. Another drawback with the CCFL approach is brightness degradation over time from a number of potential causes, such as reduction of emission mix, ballast failure, phosphor efficiency drop, or mercury absorption.
A more recent approach has attempted to use light emitting diodes (LED) for displays. Early LED applications in displays are found in hand held calculators with numeric LED displays. More recent LED applications have LED as backlights for small displays, such as hand-held devices like cell phones and personal data assistants (PDAs). Other LED applications in larger displays, such as display panels, involve complex wiring to each individual LED. The applications of LED in a broad range of displays therefore continue to present numerous challenges, such as increased complexity, limited format factor scaling, increased manufacturing costs, and reduced manufacturing yields.
Thus, a need still remains for a display system providing low cost manufacturing, improved yield, and improved reliability for the display systems. In view of the ever-increasing need to save costs and improve efficiencies, it is more and more critical that answers be found to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.